“For the fabric: do you know that six goose quills will support a man?--if not, I can assure you they will; there is lightness and strength for you! What can, with equal economy, be beaten thinner or is lighter than aluminium?--a new metal with you, I find. For propelling mechanism, study the wing of the swift-flying birds, created by our Great Spirit; you cannot _improve_ on that, but you can modify and adapt it to your particular purpose.” Then casting his eye upon my umbrella, which was lying open beside me (for I had used it to keep the sun off), he bade me observe its form, which I did. “In that worm-produced fabric,” said he, pointing to the silk shade, “you have the form of the best sustainer (parachute) that even we have yet discovered. There! I have mentioned your principal materials, now set to work, and do not longer disfigure your beautiful islands with iron webs, rabbit burrows, and crawling beetles, for such, I am told, your railway systems appear to the inhabitants of your satellite the Moon, who have very powerful telescopes, and are fond of gazing at their big brother the Earth. “Really, when I come to reflect upon the condition of you mortals, your whole system seems strange; here, six centuries after I have left the earth, you are actually eating and drinking just as when I was among you (and I was no mean connoisseur of a bottle of Sack or Malmsey), and, consequently, you are always ill and ailing. It therefore follows, as a matter of course, that half of you die before there is any necessity for you to do so. “For the first thousand or two years after the Creation, people knew what was good for them, and partook of everything fresh and good, and lived for centuries; but now it appears to me that you have a system in vogue among you called adulteration, by which one half of the community seeks to partially poison the other half, simply to gather together as many pieces of gold as they can hoard in a few years, and when they die they leave these gold coins to some one else to scatter to the four winds and the Evil One, for their so-called amusement. All very nice, I dare say, but why do you not do as I did--work, and discover the Philosopher’s Stone and Elixir Vitæ! Then, having discovered them, you could be as rich as you pleased, and live as long as you had any desire to.” “Interrupting you,” I ventured, “would it be against your bond to impart to me, a mortal, the secret of those two great discoveries you claim to have made when on earth? Would you be induced by anything I could offer you, or do for you, to divulge the component parts of your Elixir Vitæ?” The jolly little man laughed till his sides vibrated like a blanc-mange, at the very idea of _my_ being able to do anything for _him_, or offer him any equivalent for his priceless secret of continued life.